Maintaining Software May Help an Organization Learn

Information systems (IS) organizations may be constraining their behavior by viewing software maintenance as a separate process from software development. Existing research and practice views software maintenance as an expense incurred after development that should be contained through better development methodologies, better evaluation of system characteristics, better enforcement of programming standards; and more participation of users during initial systems development (Kemerer and Slaughter, 1997; Banker et al., 1993; Dekleva, 1992a). The implication of this research is that if we did it right the first time, there would be no need to continue enhancing software.

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